Ruins of Meroe

Flood Gate 10 June 2008

Look at me brimming with all the unanswered questions, like a plugged sink, or an Olympic-sized pool left to the elements for two seasons. I read the papers and again I am angry – not quite – but then not satisfied. Still, I think, I am angry at the way my elders had mismanaged my country. I scoff at their follies and their herd mentality, their faulty way of thinking, their resistance to change that truly separates those who are young from those who are not. Yet, standing at the precipice of these emotions I refuse to feel again (refuse to acknowledge) there is a void before me and my impotency rings clear, like a church bell in a clear day, it reminds me that I am nothing but a small speck in the world.

I hate – no not hate, for surely, I am above such emotions as those without an answer to it. I am not a creature condemned to feeling the same emotion for the rest of their natural lives, without release from a prison created by neural pathways in the mind. My mind is my most potent weapon, but my mind is also that with a half-constructed universe spinning on its crooked axis, with characters born from the facets of my self and my longings running through it half the time. I think of boys who burn brighter than the morning stars, whose energies crumble the empire in their minds to dust. I think of black women who treat the poor like an ugly scar, the slum life a dirty secret from the gated villages of a holy state. Then there is the girl who thinks that love is a luxury of an imperfect race, and her brother who wants to quickly fall in love. I wonder, then again, who I am, and I read the papers and the pages stare back at me, like a grayish expanse (filled with black lines) telling me that in my mind is everything, but then I am nothing at the same time.

I wonder why I read newspapers as a hobby. I wonder why I play tag with cockroaches at night. At class I sometimes think to myself why I get it so fast when others seem to be having such a hard time. I talk with people and I wonder why, unlike my betters, I have nothing to show for it; why I still fumble with my words like a nervous 8 year old child.

It is even a nuance that I think in English when I write, when talking in English feels like a half-borrowed mask. I make it a point to write e-mail to my friends in Filipino, but perhaps I am a reactive citizen, half there but not quite. I wonder what is going on in a politician’s mind. When did the prospect of changing this society became more appealing than combining chemicals in a science lab? And then the words of Randy David rings in my ears, like a distant echo, similar to the emotions I spent a year of idleness to lock: Youth of all generations can, and do, invent causes worth dying for.

I sometimes vaguely wonder what it means to die. If you tell me with certainty I will die the next morning, I might not give that much of a fight over my remaining hours alive. But then I read articles about natural disasters, and I gaze at the pictures of tears and blood and try to imagine the grief and pain that comes behind the lens. Ironically, I chant to my brain, like a silent resolve, in face of a dire emergency, I will be among the last to die. My will to live is strong enough.

Love loves those who live it, is what I say, and I do try to live it whenever I remember. The greatest pleasure in life involves the act of breathing, because if someone asks me who the happiest person alive is, I might answer that it is the dude who on a clear day suddenly thinks of lying on a hammock in his backyard under a tree, drinking coconut juice with a good book, watching the birds at the sky. I tried it once and the first gulp of air made me at peace with the earth and all its ants, crawling in my toes the way your consciousness bugs you when you pretend to take a nap.0

Someone asked me how valedictorians write their valedictory speeches. Do we have a hard time? Do we have dictionaries to incorporate complex words at hand? I think, back then, there is something I wanted to say, and that made it as easy and as natural as waking up and finding yourself still alive. I fumbled a bit (like an eternal eight year old in front of her aunt), but thought of it as four years’ worth of hard work just to communicate my feelings to the world. It was MY moment, when people can hear me whether they choose to or not, and thinking of what it means to be young and dreaming, suddenly made all the four years worth the one hour and a half.

They gave me time.

Perhaps I am no different from Shin. I shall always have the curse of feeling that I need to earn something that others have no problem getting for free.

(… But then this curse drives me. Because I am small and I am human and I am humble and selfish at the same time; I want my paradise served here on Earth, in a local flavor, not too different from the guy sitting next to me, and I want to exchange drinks and maybe a couple of toasts to a life well lived with them.)

There is nothing worse than mediocrity. Dream big and live life. Such dreams are painful, but pain is a valid human emotion, a lot like love, and if your dreams burn you, at least you have the dignity of standing among your equals in the next life.